Irma Vep

Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung playing herself in a story about the disasters that result as a middleaged French film director played by JeanPierre Laud attempts to remake Louis Feuillades classic silent film serial Les vampires. Taking place as it does largely through the eyes of a foreigner Cheung, it is also a meditation on the state of the French film industry at that time.

Cheung is employed to play the filmwithinthefilms heroine, Irma Vep an anagram for vampire, a burglar, who spends most of the film dressed in a tight, black, latex rubber catsuit, defending her directors odd choices to hostile crew members and journalists. As the film progresses, the plot mirrors the disorientation felt by the films director. Cheung the character is in many ways seen by other characters as an exotic sex object dressed in a latex catsuit both the director and Cheungs costume designer Zoe Nathalie Richard have crushes on her.The film makes reference to iconic figures in French film history Louis Feuillade, Musidora, Arletty, Franois Truffaut, the Groupe SLON, Alain Delon, and Catherine Deneuve. Thematically, the film questions the place of French cinema today. It is not a mourning for cinema with the romantic nostalgia but more like the Mexican Day of the Dead remembrance as an act of celebration, so that It is less a film about representing the past, than it is a film about addressing the present, specifically the place of France within the global economy. ........

Source: Wikipedia